The Las Vegas Shooting and the Search for Meaning

Eric Paddock, the brother of the alleged gunman in Sunday’s deadly attack in Las Vegas, seemed as bewildered as anyone about what may have set his brother Stephen on his fatal course.

Photograph by John Raoux / AP

“I’d love to help you guys,” Eric Paddock told the reporters who gathered on Monday outside his house in Orlando, Florida, just hours after his brother, Stephen Paddock, massacred more than fifty people on the Las Vegas Strip. “There’s nothing.” The reporters there were asking variations of the same question: Why did his brother do it? Eric Paddock said that Stephen had no religious or political affiliations. He was not retired, exactly, but he wasn’t actively employed, either. He had been an accountant and owned some residential property, which gave him income, and he was a semi-professional gambler, too. Two years ago, he’d moved from Florida to Nevada to escape the humidity. “He went to college, he had a job,” Eric Paddock said. “Just a guy.” Paddock had lived a mundane life until right before the end, his brother said. When Eric declared that he had a tremendous headache, there were some sympathetic noises from the reporters. Who wouldn’t have a headache, in that situation?

In Nevada, investigators, working from a different angle, from a different set of facts, were having no more luck. “We have no idea what his belief system is,” the Clark County, Nevada, sheriff Joe Lombardo said, before the sun came up on Monday. Within hours of the shooting, ISIS, based halfway around the world, made a startling claim: the group said that Paddock had converted to Islam several months ago, and that he had acted in response to its calls for violence. The group neither supplied evidence for this assertion nor backed down from it, but the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Las Vegas field office soon told reporters that federal investigators had found “no connection to any international group.” If Stephen Paddock had radicalized, in the ways we usually understand the term, it had either happened very recently or had entirely eluded his family.

Set against Eric Paddock and the government’s bewilderment was the deliberation evident at the crime scene. Stephen Paddock had selected a room on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, high enough to be an exceedingly deadly position. He had entered the room on Thursday, and for two nights he had looked down over the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest festival without doing anything. Then, on Sunday, during the festival’s final night, he used a hammer to knock the glass out from some windows and started shooting. When it was over, the police found Paddock’s body and more than a dozen rifles. He had mounted two of the rifles on tripods; one of them may have been altered so that it could operate as a fully automatic weapon. “He’s never even drawn a gun,” Eric Paddock said on Monday. Yet as more details emerged, these words began to sound more and more naïve. The tripods, the hammer, the patience—these were the methods of a meticulous killer.

Two explanations for Paddock’s actions have been offered so far, and neither makes much sense. The idea that Paddock had been an ISIS recruit seems implausible in the extreme. He had neither been Muslim, so far as anyone knew, nor interested in religion generally. He was sixty-four years old, which would have made him a full nine years older than the next-oldest American whom ISIS has ever recruited. His habitat was the slots parlor, the cocktail lounge. And yet ISIS’s propaganda arm, Amaq, kept insisting that Paddock had been one of theirs. The Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, who covers ISIS, was following along. “ISIS is tripling down,” she wrote on Twitter on Monday. The group assigned Paddock an Arabic name: Abu Abd el Bar.

Yet the second version of Paddock, the one sketched in fragments on Monday by his brother and neighbors, did not seem all that likely, either. “He snapped or something,” Eric Paddock suggested, before wondering aloud whether Stephen might have had a stroke. It would have been a very strange snap that suddenly turns a sixty-four-year-old man into a precise, impeccably organized, cold-blooded mass killer. There is an arresting detail about the Paddocks’ background: their father, a serial bank robber who had been on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list, once spent a decade on the lam after escaping from prison. Still, if there was some connection between those facts and the slaughter in Las Vegas, it was exceptionally slow to express itself. The emotional atmosphere that we’ve come to associate with mass murder does not typically stay dormant and unrecognized for half a century.

The reports about Paddock that have accumulated in the past day have been especially foggy on one essential point: Did he have a lot of money, or didn’t he? Paddock’s brother said that he had more than two million dollars in the bank, and described him as a wealthy real-estate investor, a figure of cruises and high-roller tables. But the details uncovered by reporters suggested a different kind of life. Two years ago, Paddock bought his home for three hundred and sixty-nine thousand dollars. He and his girlfriend owned two cars, a Hyundai and a Chrysler. Five years ago, after he was injured in a fall at a casino, he took the trouble to sue the establishment for ten thousand dollars, which doesn’t seem like something high-rollers generally do. Casino regulatory filings suggest that, over the last month of his life, Paddock was gambling more than ten thousand dollars close to daily. But the filings don’t say whether he won money or lost it. The version of Paddock that his brother described could probably sustain bets like that. The version suggested by the Hyundai and the Chrysler, the middle-class subdivision house, and the lawsuit for medical bills probably could not.

In the choices that Paddock made—whom to attack, when, and where—there are some echoes of other recent terrorist attacks. There are precedents for attacks on concerts. Gunmen massacred ninety people in a coördinated attack at the Bataclan Theatre, in Paris, in November of 2015; a terrorist killed twenty-two people with bombs at an Ariana Grande show in Manchester, England, earlier this year. There have been mass casualties at casinos recently, too. In June, in Manila, a Filipino man set gaming tables on fire before he killed himself in a hotel room. Thirty-seven people died, most of them from smoke inhalation. ISIS initially claimed responsibility for that attack, too, though it turned out that the man had no terrorist affiliation, just mounting gambling debts. And yet these are the weakest of possible connections—somewhere between allusions and coincidences. It has been more than a day since the attack in Las Vegas occurred. Many of the obvious informants have been interviewed. And yet very little seems solid. Maybe Paddock will remain a mystery.

In the rhythms of the media coverage, and the political response, the massacre in Las Vegas has seemed depressingly familiar. “Mass shootings are so frequent in America that the political responses to them have become ritualized,” my colleague Ryan Lizza wrote yesterday. But this time, the theatre of certainty is being performed even as the act itself continues to resist interpretation. The motives of mass murderers are never rational, or fully understood, but we usually understand the basic nature of their grievance—in some form, they usually find a way to tell us. In his driveway yesterday, Eric Paddock told reporters that they could understand everything important about his brother just by looking through the public record. “It’s an open book,” he said. But the tripods, the precision, the father, the gambling tabs, the unalarming adult life—all of this suggests other elements to the story, not accessible to the public. This is not how open books read.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.